Plotkin has advocated the combination of linear lambda calculus, polymorphism and fixed point recursion as an expressive semantic metalanguage. We study its expressive power from an operational point of view. We show that the naturally call-by-value operators of linear lambda calculus can be given a call-by-name semantics without affecting termination at exponential types and hence without affecting ground contextual equivalence. This result is used to prove properties of a logical relation that provides a new extensional characterisation of ground contextual equivalence and relational parametricity properties of polymorphic types.

We present a possible world semantics for a call-by-value higherorder programming language with impredicative polymorphism, general references, and recursive types. The model is one of the first relationally parametric models of a programming language with all these features. To model impredicative polymorphism we define the semantics of types via parameterized (world-indexed) logical relations over a universal domain. It is well-known that it is non-trivial to show the existence of logical relations in the presence of recursive types. Here the problems are exacerbated because of general references. We explain what the problems are and present our solution, which makes use of a novel approach to modeling references. We prove that the resulting semantics is adequate with respect to a standard operational semantics and include simple examples of reasoning about contextual equivalence via parametricity.

We show how to reason about “step-indexed ” logical relations in an abstract way, avoiding the tedious, error-prone, and proof-obscuring step-index arithmetic that seems superficially to be an essential element of the method. Specifically, we define a logic LSLR, which is inspired by Plotkin and Abadi’s logic for parametricity, but also supports recursively defined relations by means of the modal “later ” operator from Appel et al.’s “very modal model” paper. We encode in LSLR a logical relation for reasoning (in-)equationally about programs in call-by-value System F extended with recursive types. Using this logical relation, we derive a useful set of rules with which we can prove contextual (in-)equivalences without mentioning step indices. 1

We present a domain-theoretic model of parametric polymorphism based on admissible per’s over a domain-theoretic model of the untyped lambda calculus. The model is shown to be a model of Abadi & Plotkin’s logic for parametricity, by the construction of an LAPL-structure as defined by the authors in [7, 5]. This construction gives formal proof of solutions to a large class of recursive domain equations, which we explicate. As an example of a computation in the model, we explicitly describe the natural numbers object obtained using parametricity. The theory of admissible per’s can be considered a domain theory for (impredicative) polymorphism. By studying various categories of admissible and chain complete per’s and their relations, we discover a picture very similar to that of domain theory. 1

Plotkin suggested using a polymorphic dual intuitionistic / linear type theory (PILLY) as a metalanguage for parametric polymorphism and recursion. In recent work the first two authors and R.L. Petersen have defined a notion of parametric LAPL-structure, which are models of PILLY, in which one can reason using parametricity and, for example, solve a large class of domain equations, as suggested by Plotkin. In this paper we show how an interpretation of a strict version of Bierman, Pitts and Russo’s language Lily into synthetic domain theory presented by Simpson and Rosolini gives rise to a parametric LAPL-structure. This adds to the evidence that the notion of LAPL-structure is a general notion suitable for treating many different parametric models, and it provides formal proofs of consequences of parametricity expected to hold for the interpretation. Finally, we show how these results in combination with Rosolini and Simpson’s computational adequacy result can be used to prove consequences of parametricity for Lily. In particular we show that one can solve domain equations in Lily up to ground contextual equivalence. 1